The Knuth-Morris-Pratt (KMP) algorithm is an efficient string searching algorithm that finds occurrences of a pattern within a given text. Its efficiency primarily comes from its ability to avoid unnecessary comparisons by utilizing information gathered during the pattern matching process. The KMP algorithm preprocesses the pattern to create a longest prefix-suffix (LPS) array, which allows it to skip sections of the text that have already been matched, leading to a time complexity of , where is the length of the text and is the length of the pattern. This is a significant improvement over naive string searching algorithms, which can have a worst-case time complexity of . The space complexity of the KMP algorithm is due to the storage of the LPS array, making it an efficient choice for practical applications in text processing and data searching.
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